Where Bitching is Best

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Cheap Immitation

This isn’t some goddamn tv show. We’re not in a play, nor a movie on screen. This is real, and it’s not artistic. It’s raw, it’s rough, it’s unplanned and mercurial. Timing does not allow for a gentle swell of music at just the right moment. Sometimes we blink, burp or fart… right in the middle of something important. We have an itch, a baby cries, there is no truly captivated audience. We’re only human and there’s no way we could keep up with people who aren’t real.

Striving to constantly have picture-perfect moments, and being sad when they fall short of that, is nothing but unrealistic expectations set by media claiming to portray reality. But real people don’t know everything, they get tired, short tempered, and flare up. We can’t ask every person to perform like they’re a classically trained actor. I don’t have writers that know when to take it to the next level, and when to inject some comic relief. Each of us has to live our lives and do our best at the time we are doing it.

Even if I thought I new how to make every moment so freakishly special, that discounts the very nature of specialness itself; the fact that it’s cool is because of its rarity and spontaneity. Great timing and just the right measure are not things to be expected undoubtedly. We love for things to work out, it’s great when a plan comes together. But with the genuinely uncontrolled nature of the Universe, we’re really just celebrating happenstance.

Creating and re-creating only the things that please a narrow subset of us does nothing but waste time. All our efforts to make everything magically work out wastes precious moments we could have enjoyed in our lives. The time spent not doing things, or doing them in some special way keeps us from the organic moments that we were looking for in the first place. The moments you’re trying so desperately to engineer are only special if they happen when no one was expecting it.

That’s what makes those movie-moments so special when you really stop and think about it. That they were unplanned, free flowing, a serendipitous event that worked out despite that it probably shouldn’t have. The fact that it would otherwise be a mundane, every-day occurrence, but a lucky turn of a few key components turned it into something bigger, is the way that we know that this moment is worth being considered different in the first place.

Basically it’s not really possible to make those shining moments happen. Because when it’s been planned and manipulated it loses everything special. Recognizing those moments as they occur naturally is the greatest gift we have, so we don’t squander our efforts looking for something that isn’t real at all. Instead of building up hopes and planning on things going perfectly, let’s let happiness surprise us, as intended, relax and just enjoy it when it comes to us.